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SHIM: A Language for Hardware/Software Integration Edwards, Stephen A. Hardware/software codesign synchronous asynchronous language design integration Virtually every system designed today is an amalgam of hardware and software. Unfortunately, software and circuits that communicate across the hardware/software boundary are tedious and error-prone to create. This suggests a more automatic way to synthesize them. I present the SHIM language, which combines imperative C-like semantics for software and RTL-like semantics for hardware to allow a unified description of hardware/software systems. Hardware processes and software functions communicate through shared variables, hardware for which is automatically synthesized by the SHIM compiler, which generates C and synthesizable VHDL. I demonstrate the effectiveness of the language by re-implementing an I2C bus controller. The SHIM source is half the size of an equivalent manual implementation, slightly faster, and has a smaller memory footprint. Partial and complete hardware implementations in SHIM are also presented, showing that SHIM is succinct and effective. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Stephen A. Edwards 2005 Is Part Of Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 4491, Synchronous Programming - SYNCHRON'04 (2005) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/DagSemProc.04491.5 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-1580 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.04491.5 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode